I’ve been looking back over the past week and I think I can definitely call it a success. I had a primary goal to promote Programmer Day and the measuring stick I was going to use was website traffic and participation. I got more traffic than I dreamed of and was thrilled with the participation. I’m going to claim at least some responsibility for the Fark thread that spawned with the link to the site, if you haven’t seen it you should take a look. I envision Internet archeologists from the future finding this thread and it being the Rosetta Stone of programming languages. The How Do You Say thread was unplanned but something I was very happy with, if I ever find myself in Poland on the 256th day of the year I’ll be ready.

My secondary goals were all failures and point to some areas where I really need to focus on improvement:

- Return Visitors: I wanted people to come back to the site and post any pictures or stories of their celebration (no matter how cheesy) and that didn’t happen. I ended up staying home with a sick wife and baby which let me monitor the progress of the site, but left me without a story to tell, so that probably didn’t help, not that I regret it.

- Reimbursement: Turns out no one wants to donate to some random guy’s ugly site or want to buy a poorly designed dorky T-shirt, go figure! I had hoped to get enough to pay for the registration of the domain for the next year and maybe help with the hosting, but I threw together everything so quickly that I’m not surprised it didn’t pan out. I still don’t want to put ads on the site but I am going to try and get sponsors. It became painfully obvious that a $7.00 hosting plan wasn’t going to cut it when the Fark.com hits started.

So I’ve got a lot to learn and do for next year but I couldn’t be happier with the results, I’m coming away from this with two things:

1. Taking a small risk can still lead to big rewards, this event cost me a few hours and a little over $3.00. If nothing else I got a great story and a little bit of fame, that alone was worth it. I saw an opportunity and went for it, something I suggest to anyone out there - what did I have to lose?, even if I had failed totally I would have learned something.
2. A greater love of Programmers! It would seem that code is an international language and programmer’s worldwide all have a little geek in them clamoring for a day they can call their own

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.